So far I have seen six episodes of the TV series, The Affair, Season 2, on DVD, and I’m considerably impressed by it.

Noah (Dominic West) has left his wife Helen (Maura Tierney) for a former nurse, Alison (Ruth Wilson), and has also been arrested—the plot just has to be enriched—for the murder of a cad who impregnated Noah’s daughter.

Many of the scenes with Helen are powerful (and one, alas, which is artsy), as when she tells her strident mother to leave her house. The show examines the ties with other people that cannot quite be severed as well as those that are severed all too easily. It is intelligent enough, in one episode, to have Alison talk the way the black hero in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man talks: she complains of her own invisibility, that people never see her, Alison the person.

I hope I am not repulsed by anything in The Affair and wish to stop watching it. So far it’s been riveting, and I’d like to write about the remaining episodes.